


A Promise in the Sky

by samyazaz



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-09 09:54:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8886397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samyazaz/pseuds/samyazaz
Summary: Thordak falls, but not without cost.or: Five times Vex reached out to Percy, and one time he reached out to her.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [navaan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/gifts).



1.

  


Thordak falls, but not without cost. The earth itself jumps and shudders beneath the impact as his body finally crashes down and is still. And that stillness spreads out like ripples across the battlefield, as the fighting ends and people begin to realize what they've won -- and what they've lost.

Vex walks with careful steps through the wreckage, hardly daring to breathe, much less to speak, and does what she can to help the injured whom she comes across. She can't do much, she's not Pike, but she can ease pain a little, until Pike can come along and do better. She can bring people back from unconsciousness, from the brink of death, if she's quick about it.

Every body she passes that does not move, and cannot be roused, sits in her gut like a small stone, and she makes her way through the battlefield until she carries so many of them with her that she can't even breathe around the pain of it, until they weigh her down so much it takes all the strength she has in her to drag herself forward another step.

They were friends, many of them. Those who weren't were allies, at least. They rallied here to Vox Machina's call, they fought at Vox Machina's side. They died for Tal'Dorei's freedom.

Percy finds her, swaying in the middle of the aftermath. She used up what magic she had in the fight against Thordak, and what little remained healing those she could. And now she has nothing left, the well of power within her run dry, but she can't _stop trying--_

His presence brings her back to herself, though it doesn't make her any steadier on her feet. She stares at him, at his face that had been so inscrutable to her for so long. Now it seems expressive, weariness carved into the creases at the corners of his eyes, concern written in the lift of his brow, pain made obvious in the set of his mouth.

He's injured. The shoulder of his coat is torn, the fabric made dark with the spreading stain of his blood. She catches her breath and finds she can move suddenly, _has_ to move, to pick her way carefully to him and grasp him by the shoulders and demand, “Are you all right?”

He grimaces as she takes hold of him, and she's not sure if it's pain or merely discomfort. He's never been entirely comfortable with the touch of others, she knows. She would pull her hands away and give him that back, but she can't seem to make her fingers uncurl from the lapels of his coat. Desperation overrides everything else as she grabs onto him and demands, “Percy, what happened? How badly are you hurt?” She has nothing left, but she tries anyway, presses the fingers of one hand to the hollow of his throat, there nearest place she can touch skin, and moves her other in the looping swirls of the spell as she mutters the incantation beneath her breath. She's wrung out, but the specter of Glintshore still hangs over her, will always hang over her, and if he's wounded she has to _try_ —

He covers her hands with his, the one on his chest and the one in the air both, stopping the spell before she can even try to cast it, and shakes his head. "I will be fine, in time. There are others who do not have that luxury. I wouldn't keep you from them."

"I can't," she admits, her voice unsteady, her hands shaking with fatigue. "I can't do any more. I don't have anything left."

"Then we will do what we can without magic."

She nods but can't quite bring herself to move, not yet, not with Percy's pulse thumping steadily -- rapidly -- where she has her fingers pressed at the hollow of his throat.

He doesn't make her, and stands there motionless with her until the weight of it is too much for her to bear. She takes an uncertain half-step forward -- and then, like an arrow loosed from a bow, she can't stop her momentum, can't help but close all the distance between them and wrap her arms around Percy's neck and bury her face against his throat. She breathes unsteadily there, in the closeness and the warmth, and chokes back the tears that threaten to drown her.

And Percy, Percy who grew up in a family who didn't touch one another, Percy who likes physical contact little and trusts it even less -- he slides his arms around her back, and holds her there where she stands, and he allows it like it's as easy as breathing.

  


2.

They return to Greyskull Keep just one more time. Thordak is dead and Raishan as well, they've done what they set out to do but they still can't go back home. Not this home, anyway. The Conclave may be vanquished but Emon is still in ruins, buildings and walls turned to rubble and the Cloudtop District a nightmarish hellscape even in Thordak's absence. Who knows how long it'll take for the fires to die and the lava pools to turn back to solid stone. It might not happen it their lifetime.

It might not happen at all.

And so they go to Greyskull Keep once more, not as the homecoming they'd wished for but just to gather up those things they'd left behind that scavengers hadn't taken, and that might still prove useful.

The keep seems larger now than it ever did, and somehow also smaller. The furniture is gone along with the furnishings, the rooms barren and vast and cold. It hardly seems at all like the same place they had lived in just a few months before. It had always seemed to hold warmth, then.

Vex makes her way through the keep, working her way down every hall, through every floor, bearing witness to what they've lost. This is the first place she and Vax had been able to call home since they were children. Since Syldor came and claimed them. Syngorn had never been home, not to her, and Byroden had been ash by the time they'd been able to return to it. They'd only ever had one another -- but then they'd had Vox Machina, and the keep.

Her room has been ransacked just as much as the rest of the keep. Her bed frame remains, too bulky to easily carry off, though her mattress is gone, and her clothes as well.

Six months before, she'd have mourned the loss. She'd have raged, and she'd have tallied the cost of every garment. There had been fine gowns in there, as befit their status as members of the Tal'Dorei Council, made of silks and velvets and trimmed in finery. They were the sorts of clothes that they could have never afforded in Byroden, and that she'd never thought to crave, and the sort that she'd been forced to wear in Sygnorn, lest she be an embarrassment to their father's name.

She'd never wanted them in Byroden, and she'd hated them in Syngorn. But once they'd left Syngorn and Syldor and the oppressive weight of their expectations behind, it had been such a source of pride to her, the first time she'd been able to purchase such a fine gown for herself with her own coin, earned by her own hand. Six months ago, the loss would have been symbolic, and hurt so much worse for it.

Now... Now, she spares a sigh for the remains of her ransacked armoire, and then sets it aside. It's hard to care about pretty dresses now, when they all carry so much heavier burdens upon their shoulders. It's hard to imagine there might even be a cause to wear such finery again, anyway.

"Are you all right?"

Percy's voice is quiet, tentative, but it still makes her startle. She covers the reaction with a laugh, a flippant toss of her hair over her shoulder.

"Of course, darling." He's in her doorway, standing at the threshold like even now, after everything they've been through and the months in which this room has belonged to no one but the scavengers, he still needs her permission to enter. He's angled, though, not quite filling the doorway, leaving room for her to slip out and past him, if she wanted to. If she needed to.

She eyes that gap, and the arrow-straight way that he holds himself, like a gentleman come calling and not a friend and lover, and wonders how much of that is his upbringing and how much of that is Orthax.

She remembers all too well that day, when she pinned him to the wall and he told her, with a look in his eye she scarcely recognized, "I feel cruel." She thinks he remembers it too well, too. And even after the Briarwoods and after he threw the Pepperbox in that acid pit, he's carried the weight of that around with him. He fears for her, when she's around him, even just a little, and she wonders if he leaves that avenue of escape there to reassure her, or to reassure himself.

She's not afraid of him. She never has been, even when Orthax's grip on him had been at its strongest. She squares her shoulder sand walks past him like it's nothing.

The space he leaves for her isn't quite wide enough for her to move through without either knocking her shoulder against his, or turning to slide through it. She chooses the latter, and as she does, her hand brushes up against his.

She doesn't think she does it intentionally. But once it's done, she hesitates, there halfway through the door with him, and glances up to meet his gaze.

He doesn't flinch away from it, just loos back at her and for a moment neither of them move, touching only where the edge of her hand has grazed the back of his, the air growing warm between them.

She slips her hand into his, carefully, deliberately. He takes a breath she hadn't noticed he'd been holding, and lets her lace her fingers through his.

"Do you have everything you need?" she asks him, her voice light and her hand locked with his.

He takes a moment to respond, and when he does, it's slow and considered, and not light at all. "Yes," he says, with a hoarse edge to his voice. "I believe I do."

She smiles and tightens her grip on his hand ever so slightly, urging him out of the doorway. "Good. Me, too."

He nods once and takes his cue, falling into step beside her, and neither of them look back as they leave the ghosts of their past behind.

  


3.

Spring is coming to Whitestone. To much of the rest of Tal'Dorei, it's already made itself at home, bringing warm breezes and fields of wildflowers. In Whitestone, its presence is announced with muddy, frigid puddles of snowmelt and clear skies and a sense of restlessness lodged within everyone's breast. There are no flowers, not yet. They'll come soon enough, but for now, the thaw means that Vex pulls on her coat and gloves and winds a scarf around her neck, and goes down to survey the piece of land that accompanies her new title.

The husk of the manor that Scanlan burned down reaches dark, craggy fingers up through the snow and ice, like the bones of a great, dead beast. "It's not much," she says, and Percy shifts at her side.

She doesn't need to glance at him to know the wry, self-satisfied look on his face. She's pretty sure he doesn't need to look at her to know how she's beaming, either, and she's pretty sure he doesn't.

"No," he agrees, and there's the warmth she expected in his voice, the quiet smugness. He's so damned pleased with himself over this, this title and the way it had made her father gape like a fish for just a second, and if he didn't completely deserve every bit of it, she'd want to smack him a little bit. "Not anymore."

"Not _yet_ ," she corrects, and steps forward onto the land that is now hers, onto the property she _owns_. "It's going to be wonderful."

"I have no doubt."

It's too big a job for one day, clearing away the remains of the burnt-down manor that had stood here before, but a start is a start, no matter how small. She begins pulling what she can from the half-frozen mess of it all, splintered boards and broken blocks of stone. When she turns back to Percy, he's still standing there on the edge of the street, watching her with a little smile playing about his mouth.

"Are you going to help," she asks him, "or are you just going to stand there and watch?"

"I'm hardly dressed for it," he says, holding his arms out as though to prove his point. "If I have to ask Cassandra for more funds to buy a new coat because I've ruined mine with ash and soot, I think she may well disown me."

"We can spare it from the party funds, you dick," she calls to him, laughing. "Besides, that coat's seen worse. Come up here and help me." She climbs to the top of the rubble and looks back at him from upon it, her hips cocked, her fists braced upon them. "Or are you going to leave me to do this all by myself?"

"Lady Vex'ahlia, slayer of dragons," he murmurs. "I do believe you can conquer any opponent you set yourself at. Especially a house someone has already defeated for you." His words carry to her, but only barely. Louder, he says with a reasonable tone, "You can hire people to do this, you know. There are plenty in the city who could use the work."

"It's _my_ home." She drops down onto the other side of the mound, and lifts her voice so he'll still be able to hear her. "I'm going to have a hand in rebuilding it!"

He says something in response, but she can't make it out. She comes up a moment later, sticking her head above the top of the rubble mound, to find Percy picking his way carefully across the very edges of the wreckage. "Percy, darling?" she calls to him.

He lifts his head to look towards her just as the handful of compressed snow she tosses out hits him, square in the face. The snow's half-melted, wet, and it clings to his cheeks and his lashes and the lenses of his glasses, where it's knocked them askew upon the bridge of his nose.

He stares up at her, over the crooked rim of his glasses. And then all thoughts of his coat are abandoned as he races up the mound towards her, ducking down to grab a handful of snow and begin to compress it into a ball without even missing a stride.

She shrieks with laughter and ducks down out of sight, scrambling to make another snowball as Percy's first arcs over the rubble and her head and explodes at her feet.

It's a brief but violent skirmish that ends with both of them painted with snow and Percy defending the front of a rubble barricade while Vex sneaks around from the side and claims victory with a snowball stuffed down the back of his coat. He hollers in outrage and claws the coat off of himself so that he can wipe the snow from the back of his neck, and she falls backwards onto her rear end in the snow with laughter.

"You are devious," he says at her like he's unhappy about it, but there's snowmelt dripping from his eyebrows and a grin he can't suppress tugging at the corners of his mouth. "I'm glad we're usually fighting on the same side."

"You're darn right, you are." She picks herself up out of the snow and dusts it off of her, but the stuff's wet enough that it's starting to soak through her clothes, and the temperatures outside may be warming up, but they're still cold. She shivers despite herself.

Percy, of course, notices it. He looks her over with a narrowed glance, the way she's seen him look at things in his workshop before, like she's a puzzle he's trying to solve. And then he shakes his coat out and drapes it around her shoulders. The warmth of his body still lingers in the fabric, and eases some of the chill out of her as she unwraps her arms from about her middle and threads them down the sleeves of the coat instead.

It's too big for her. She feels like a child wearing a parent's borrowed clothing and pretending to be grown up. But it makes Percy smile as he settles it on her shoulders with a tug, a softer sort of smile.

She catches his hands in hers while they're still on the coat's lapels and covers them. Her fingers feel like ice against hers. She leans in, leaning her forehead against the middle of his chest and soaking in his warmth this way, too.

He closes his fingers tighter on the fabric and holds onto her, though he must be at least as cold as she had been before he'd given her the coat. When she tips her face up to his, their noses brush. His is cold, as is his cheek when she brushes up against the stubble that dusts it. As are his lips, when she rises up onto her toes to press a kiss against them.

His lips are cold but his mouth is warm, when he frees his hands from underneath hers and slides them beneath the coat, around her waist instead. They stand like that, holding each other, kissing each other gently in the snow, until she pulls back and leans her brow against his chest again.

This time, he holds her closer than before, and the coat mostly surrounds both of them. "All right," she says at last, grumbling. "I'll hire some stupid workers."

She can hear the grin in his voice as he settles her in closer against his chest. "Excellent. I knew I'd persuade you around to my way of thinking eventually." As she's drawing breath to protest, to declare that she's changed her mind if he's going to be a smug bastard about it, his cold fingers find a gap beneath the hem of her shirt and press against the small of her back, driving her in against him with a gasp. He takes advantage of it and kisses her once more, and when he comes up to breathe says, "Besides, you've got far more important things to do with your time than to spend it at unskilled labor, after all," like he's continuing a discussion.

And there are so many points and counterpoints she could make, but spring is coming to Whitestone and he's warm against her and so she smiles up at him and admits that yes, she really does.

  


4.

Vex stands with her arms folded, head angled to the side, and studies the place where the walls of her new home abruptly and inexplicably stop, leaving a wide gap open where she knows there had _definitely_ been walls on the building plans that she had given the masons. "What did you do?" she demands of Percy beside her.

"Why do you assume it was my fault so quickly?" he asks, disingenuous.

"Because you're a tinkerer. It's what you do." She spins on a heel to face him. "Percy, you do not get totinker with _my house_."

He smiles and shifts his gaze past her, gazing out the hole in the wall. "I wanted to surprise you with it. You trust me, don't you?"

"Not in the least," she shoots back.

His smile flashes to a grin. "Good. Smart woman."

"Percival Frederickstein--"

"Oh gods." He lets out a burst of laughter. "Okay, there's no call for _that_. You'll like it, I promise."

"There is a _hole_ in my _house_."

"There will be doors, obviously."

She eyes him dubiously. It's not obvious in the least, as far as she's concerned. "In the wall."

He hums acknowledgment and nods.

"In the wall that's _thirty feet from the ground_?"

"There's too many trees and buildings to make taking off from the ground very convenient, much less safe, don't you think?"

She snaps her mouth shut and stares at him. "You built this for the broom?"

The gaze he slants to her is sidelong and knowing. "I built this for _you_."

She comes up to the edge with careful steps and looks down at the ground that seems very far below them, and the crowns of the clusters of trees throughout the city that are so close beneath them that it feels as though she could step out off the truncated wall and walk across them like a carpet.

"You built this for me," she echoes softly, and a brilliant smile spreads across her face.

Percy is looking at her with a keen glance and that same, half-smug smile. "Do you want to try it out?"

She has the broom slung off of her back almost before he's finished asking the question. She settles herself quickly into the saddle that he made for it -- that he made for _her_ \-- and glances back over her shoulder at him. "Do you want a ride?"

He gives a sharp burst of laughter even as he's shaking his head. "Oh gods, no. I like both my feet firmly on the ground, thank you. I'll leave the flying to the likes of you and your brother." As the laughter dies, though, it leaves him with a fond smile on his face and a warmth in his eyes. He gestures to the opening in the wall, says, "Go on. Let's see how it works for you. There's still time to make changes if it doesn't, or if you hate it."

She wants to demand, _How could I ever hate it?_ , wants to say, _I've never hated anything you've made for me_ , wants to tell him, _I love it because you were thinking of me_. She holds all those words back, though, and instead just speaks the Draconic words that activate the broom and whizzes out about the treetops and the roofs of Whitestone.

It feels like lifetimes ago that she told Scanlan that flying gave her the greatest sense of freedom that she's ever known, but it's still true. The wonder and the joy of it hasn't worn off no matter how many times she's done it. With the wind in her hair and the city speeding by beneath her, her heart sings and she tips her face up to the sky overhead and laughs in giddy, delirious delight.

When she comes back, her cheeks are chapped from the wind and ache from the smile she can't repress. She comes back in through the entryway Percy had made for her, throws herself off of her broom and straight into Percy's arms.

He catches her with little more than an, "Oof!" of surprise, and wraps his arms around her back as she throws hers around his neck and clings to him as tightly as she's able.

"Percy, thank you so much." She presses her face to his shoulder to soak up the tears that cling to her lashes.

He brings a hand up to cup the back of her head. "You are most welcome, my dear. I hoped you'd like it, but we can always have them close it up if you don't."

"Don't you dare." She sniffs and lifts her head, loosens her arms enough to let her sink back down onto her heels, though she doesn't release him. "I'm going to have to name it the Eyrie now, you realize," she says, beaming up at him. "You've left me no choice."

"The Eyrie," he muses, like he's rolling the name over his tongue and testing the weight and the shape of it. "I like it." He brushes a hand over the feathers tucked behind her ear. "It suits you."

She tightens her hands on the back of his neck, pulling until he bends down toward her and she can lean her forehead against his. "Thank you," she breathes, warm and close between them.

He cups her cheek in his hand, grazing his thumb against her cheekbone, and murmurs, "Always," and her heart is so full and so joyous that she has to rise up onto her toes to close the little bit of space left between them and press a kiss to his mouth.

  


5.

Vex has known it's inevitable since the moment they visited Zephra and Korren urged Keyleth to finish her aramente and return home to lead her people. She knew this day was coming, when Keyleth chose her people over Vox Machina and Vax chose to remain at her side, but being able to brace for its coming hasn't made it any easier to bear. It's still the worst pain she's known since the day they discovered the charred remains of Byroden.

"I'm happy for you. I really am," she tells Vax, choked through her tears, and then she grabs her broom and flies as high in the sky as she can, until Whitestone looks like a toy beneath her and the air is icy and every heaving breath she takes turns to fog before her.

He could fly after her and catch her, if he wanted to, and then she'd have no choice but to weep and scream at him about how they've always had each other, always, even when they had nothing else, and how can he just _leave_ her like this. But he calls after her once and takes an aborted step to follow her, and then he lets her go.

She comes down eventually, when she's cried out all the tears she has and is left dry and hollow. She feels like a husk, like a careless touch would turn her to dust.

Keyleth and Vax are nowhere to be seen, and she doesn't know if they've left for good or simply found somewhere more comfortable to wait for her. Either way, she doesn't want to talk to either of them yet. Doesn't think she could, even if she tried. She flies into the Eyrie through the door Percy had made for her, straight into her private rooms. She wouldn't put it past Vax to break into them to wait for her, here where she'd be hard-pressed to avoid him, but a quick scan of her rooms turns up nothing and no one out of place. She lets out a long, long breath and drops down onto the edge of her bed, pressing her face into her hands.

She's only there a moment before there's a quiet knock at the door. She makes a face at it through her fingers, then drops them and calls out, "Yes? Who is it?" as she runs her hands through her hair and makes a quick check that she looks presentable and put-together, and not like she's been crying over her brother hundreds of feet in the air.

"It's Percy," comes from the other side of the door, and that's almost as bad as Keyleth or Vax would be.

She sighs and drops the pretense, opens the door and stands in it instead of stepping back to invite him through. "How did you know I was back? I've only been here a minute."

"Jarett's on duty. He saw you flying back." He takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders, standing straight and tall. Falling back on his breeding, like he does when something's difficult or uncomfortable. "If you wish to talk, I'm a very good listener--"

"I don't," she says flatly.

He acknowledges it with a nod. "If you wish to listen, then--"

She laughs a little, a bubble of it rising up, startled out of her. "You are very good with words, too, yes, I know. But you are mostly good with them when you're playing politics and I'm not in the mood to be persuaded tonight, Percy."

He steps towards her as though to walk through the doorway, and she moves back for him without thought, without pausing long enough to decide to block his way. He comes past her into the room and turns just inside it, turning back to her.

"I'm not here as a de Rolo," he says gently, and it's in the tone of voice that's _his_ , that he uses when he's surrounded by those he trusts and he's relaxed and not feeling the need to put on airs. It makes her breathe a little easier. "I'm just here as Percy."

She could tell him to leave and he would, and there's a part of her that wants to. There's a large part that wants to stew in her misery, wants to be able to pull her knees to her chest and wrap her arms around her legs and cry without having to be told that she shouldn't be sad over Keyleth finally taking her place as the leader of her people, or of Vax having found someone he loves so much.

But she knows, too, that it's the separation that's bothering her, the distance between them all that's breaking her heart, and pushing Percy away now will do nothing to mend that. So she takes a deep breath and nods, and steps forward to crash against him, her head under his chin and her face pressed into the hollow of his throat.

He wraps one arm around her and reaches out with the other to swing the door shut. And then he doesn't even try to shuffle her off to somewhere they can sit more comfortably, he just stays there with her leaning against him and speaks, quiet and still so terribly gentle.

"The thing about growing up in a family as large as mine was," he says, his words drifting a little like he's already lost in thought, "is that it becomes very obvious very early on that people are always going to be leaving."

She makes a low sound, more for his sake, at the moment, than for hers.

He lifts a hand to her head and strokes her hair. "I don't mean for good. I mean that the household was always a very transient and mutable thing. Father would leave for a fortnight to visit cousins, or Mother would be gone to conduct political negotiations, and this sibling or that would be off making their own familial visits, or taking an excursion with a tutor. One year we scarcely saw Julius all summer because the spring rains had washed a bridge out along one of our busiest roads, and he spent the whole of the season down on the banks of the river overseeing its reconstruction."

"Whitestone has engineers," she says against the fine weave of his shirt. It makes him chuckle a little beneath his breath, an echo of what he'd said to her her every time she'd grown too invested in the Eyrie's construction, as he led her off to leave the workers to their duties.

"Yes," he agrees, and works his fingers into her hair, pressing and kneading against her scalp. "But Julius was coming into himself and eager for responsibility, and Father thought it would be a fine way to let him get a taste for it without setting him loose on his own entirely. It was meant to be an exercise in leadership and planning, and many of the skills he'd need when he took our parents' place as Guardian."

Percy goes quiet then, and still where he holds her, with his fingers woven through her hair and his hand cupping the back of her head, and she knows him well enough that she knows he's thinking of his brother, who studied all his life for a role he never got to fill, and of Cassandra, who was never expected to lead and never taught how to.

He draws a deep breath and lets it out, and draws another before he speaks, like he's trying to clear the air from his lungs and replace it with something cleaner. "My point," he says softly, "is there were rarely three days in a row where the same people could be found within the castle's walls. It's natural, I think, when two people have only each other, for them to cling to one another all the harder. But in a family like mine, in a large family, it's unsustainable. You learn young that people will leave, that sometimes there will be something more compelling that pulls them away from you, and perhaps that's a harsh lesson for a child. But you learn, too, that they will _return_. That leaving and loss are not the same thing, and that just because someone rides away from you for a time, doesn't mean that they don't love you with all their heart."

Vex squeezes her eyes shut against a fresh, burning wave of grief. "Even when we lost everything else," she breathes, "we still had each other."

"And you still do." He leans down and presses a kiss to the crown of her head. "There's a surety to family, I think," he murmurs, thoughtful. "Friends may grow apart and lovers can be left behind, but you can't cast off your blood. It's reassuring, I think, to know that no matter the time or the distance that stretches between you, you will always be bound by that."

"Percival," she says plaintively, shaken more than she'd like to admit by the thought of how much time and distance may soon separate her from her brother. "This is not _helping_."

"The thing is, darling..." He tucks a finger beneath her chin and tilts her face up to his. His gaze is so soft and so full of sympathy that it nearly breaks her. "The thing is, you're still used to thinking that you only have your brother. I think it's easy to forget, when that's all you've known, that your family has grown considerably these past few years." He kisses her, not on the mouth where she expects it, but on the brow. She shuts her eyes and wavers in his embrace. "We are your family, Vex'ahlia. You have a very large one who loves you very much, but we can't all stay in the same place forever." His smile grows warmer, teasing now. "The mansion could fit us no matter how our numbers grew, I suppose, but I fear we'd all die of scurvy in very short order. One can't live on chicken forever."

It forces a laugh out of her. The first one was bitter and painful. This one feels more genuine, and that sets her on more of an even keel. "No, I suppose one can't." Still, she sobers, and catches Percy's hand to press her cheek into it. "I don't know what I'll do without him," she admits, scarcely audible, and feels her heart crack in her chest like ice.

"You'll miss him," Percy says evenly. "You'll think about him most days. You'll live your life, though, even as you wish he were around to share it." He tucks her in close again, her head beneath his chin and his warmth surrounding her. "You'll write him reams of letters, I expect, and harass every wizard you know into casting teleportation for you more often than they can spare. And knowing you, I think someday, you are going to start to take those thoughts of wondering what to do without him, and turn them instead to plans for what to do when he and Keyleth inevitably make you an aunt."

"Gross," she says, and feigns gagging, because that's a tradition she can't bear to break just yet. But even as she says it, the thought of a niece or nephew lodges in her chest like a seed and spreads the first faint tendrils of warmth there. It feels like the first flower blossom breaking through the icy crust of winter snow, like a single drop of hope in the middle of a vast and frozen landscape. She can hold on to the thought of it, of a new family member to welcome into the fold, and let the warmth of that joy soak through her right to her bones. "I can take them for rides on the broom," she says, in a voice that would almost pass as eager. "Oh, Vax would hate that, it'd be _marvelous_."

Percy smiles, warm with it, and she thinks he likes the idea of a young niece or nephew to spoil as well. "People always change, given enough time," he tells her. "Which means families do too. And change is hard -- gods help me, I know it is. But hard doesn't necessarily have to mean _bad_."

She leans her forehead against his chest again and just breathes there for a moment, her arms cinching tight enough around his waist that he loses his breath a little bit. But he doesn't protest, and eventually she lets out a long, long sigh and says, "Thank you, Percy," against the collar of his shirt, and finds that she actually means it.

  


+1.

Percy is not very good at keeping still. It's how he got started with his tinkering as a child -- it was something to keep his hands busy, and his mind occupied. And as an adult, there's always been a battle to run to, or prepare for, or a gun to clean or ammunition to make.

Now-- now, they're battles are fought, and won, and have been left to others to carry on. Now there's Whitestone, and the Eyrie, and Vex sitting crosslegged at his side, eagerly tearing open a letter with an insignia that looks familiar, but he can't catch a good enough glimpse of to place.

"Oh!" she breathes, and a brilliant smile breaks across her face like sunlight across the mountain tops. "It's from Zahra, she and Kash are leaving Vasselheim for the winter to avoid the ice and snow, and want to know if they can stop by for a time on their way south. Oh, what a stupid question, of _course_ they can." She looks thoughtful for a moment, as sharp-eyed as an eagle. "Do you suppose we could get Cassandra to write her an official letter insisting upon it?"

He reaches out to her and runs a hand along the small of her back because he can, because it makes her twist to look at him and shoot him a smile and lean back to press into his touch. "They won't exactly be escaping the snow if they stop here in Whitestone."

Vex just huffs a breath. "Compared to Vasselheim, it'll be a treat. Besides, _we're_ here," she adds, as though it's the _coup de grace_.

"Vex and Keyleth have promised to come for Winter's Crest," he reminds her, and it fills him with a quiet sort of pleasure at the way her face glows. "Kash might not want to spend winter in the same snowbound city as Keyleth, all things considered."

She scoffs at that. "He's not still hung up on her. He's got Zahra. Do you think we could convince Pike's temple to do without her for a few weeks?"

He smiles and scratches lightly at her back through her shirt. She stretches beneath his touch and makes a sound almost like a cat's purr. "Do you intend to convince Grog to come by, too? And Scanlan and--"

" _Yes_." Her eyes burn, avid with the sudden idea. "Oh, we have to. I'm sure he intends to be in Kymal for Winter's Crest, but we could tell him to invite Kaylie along, couldn't we? Oh, and Allura." She scrambles up off of the bed and across the room to retrieve a sheet of parchment and a quill, and starts jotting a rapid series of notes. "We'll write her a letter, surely they've done enough work restoring the Cobalt Reserve that they can spare her for Winter's Crest. --No. I'll write _Kima_. If anyone can persuade her to it, Kima can, and she must be going half mad there with no one to swing her maul at."

Vex hesitates, glancing up at Percy with her quill poised over the page. "Do you think-- You don't think it's stupid, do you? Do you think they'd want to?"

Some days, she doesn't so much ooze self-confidence as she radiates it, glowing like a sun, so bright it hurts to look at her. And other days, her cracks show and her vulnerability slips through and he wants nothing so much as to pull her into his arms and kiss her until she's forgotten all about it. It makes him think of Saundor and the Shademirk, and sometimes he's quite sure she's thinking of it too, and that makes him itch for the weight of his guns in his hands more than anything else. "It's not stupid," he tells her, and watches relief spread across her face. "They might not all be able to come, but it's still not stupid."

"I'll write them, then," she says with a decisive nod, and starts writing more notes.

"Write them in the morning," Percy suggests, and tightens his arm around her waist.

She sets parchment and quill aside and lets him pull her down, stretched out at his side across the bed. She pillows her chin on his chest. The sharp point of it digs in, but he wouldn't dislodge her for the world. "If they _can_ ," she says, her voice brimming with excitement, with hope, with joy. "If they can all come-- If we could have everyone together again-- It would be perfect."

There's a constant, quiet itch in the back of his brain these days, an insidious voice whispering that surely there must be something he could be doing, he _should_ be doing, making him restless without work to keep his hands occupied. But the voice is getting quieter these days, and for just a moment, with the afternoon sun slanting in through the windows and Vex at his side, happily scheming to get all the people they love best in the world together in Whitestone for Winter's Crest, there's no restlessness in his heart, just a quiet, profound sense of peace unlike anything he's known in longer than he can remember.

"It would be perfect," he agrees with her. "It will be." And he reaches for her, curls an arm around her waist and pulls her in close against him, leans his cheek on her shoulder and lets out a long, slow breath when she wraps her arms around him in turn and holds on.

This is nothing like what he thought his future would hold, even only a few years back. It's nothing like what he thought he wanted as a young man. But Vex curls against him and hums a soft, satisfied noise as she does so, and he pulls careful fingers through her hair and knows the soft, quiet warmth of true contentment.


End file.
